DELRAY TO SLAP LIMITS ON OWNERS OF LOTS

If the city has its way, owners of private parking lots will be subject to stringent new requirements for placing boots on cars that park illegally on their lots.

Months after the administration and business leaders received complaints that an East Atlantic Avenue property owner booted several cars, the City Commission on Tuesday introduced an ordinance to regulate booting.

The proposed ordinance sets the maximum fee for boot removals at $25, standardizes warning signs, requires verbal warnings from a parking attendant and allows violators to make their payments by cash, credit card or check.

The metallic boots are devices placed on tires to immobilize vehicles. They are used commonly by government agencies to collect unpaid bills, but in Delray Beach at least one property owner has used them legally to penalize car owners for parking improperly.

The city decided to draft the ordinance, modeled after a similar law in Miami Beach, in response to a decision last spring by the former owners of Atlantic Plaza to boot violators. City Manager David Harden said he doesn't know any other city business that exercises its right to boot.

The primary complaints at Atlantic Plaza were that the owners posted inadequate signs, charged $60 fees to remove the boots, required car owners to pay only in cash and provided no warning, said Robert Barcinski, the assistant city manager.

Some commissioners gave tentative support to the new ordinance.

"I'm glad to say now on record that we're going to prevent what happened with the previous owner of Atlantic Plaza," Commissioner Pat Archer said.

To create the ordinance, the commission is relying on a new state law that permits cities to regulate booting. A public hearing on the ordinance will be on Sept. 21, and commissioners will vote after that.

In other action, the commission gave permission to Delray Beach-based Ironwood Properties to exceed downtown's 48-foot building height limitation so it could construct a 54-foot-high office building.

The four-story complex will be part of Town Square, an office and 22-unit townhouse development on Northeast First Street between Northeast Fifth and Sixth avenues.

The commission also approved $14,970 to hire an engineering company to survey and estimate the costs for dredging the muck-filled canals in the Tropic Isle neighborhood, whose residents filed a lawsuit against the city for refusing to dredge them.

The suit is seeking $4 million in damages to pay for the dredging.

Leon Fooksman can be reached at lfooksman@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6647.